by Elle Adams
A Ghost and a Hard Place
A Reaper Witch Mystery
Elle Adams
This book was written, produced and edited in the UK, where some spelling, grammar and word usage will vary from US English.
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Copyright © 2020 Elle Adams
All rights reserved.
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Contents
A Ghost and a Hard Place
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Thank you for reading!
About the Author
A Ghost and a Hard Place
Welcome to Hawkwood Hollow, where the dead outnumber the living.
Maura is settling into her new life. She's working at the local inn, helping Carey hunt for ghosts in her free time, and she even has a date with the local detective.
But she's always feared her past would catch up to her, and it turns out she has a good reason to worry when a new Reaper shows up in town. As the local ghosts start vanishing, Maura is inclined to blame the newcomer, but something more may be going on.
With a group of teens at Carey's magical academy deciding to start their own ghost-hunting blog, too, the pressure builds on Maura to find the source of the vanishing spirits.
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Can Maura get to the bottom of the mystery before the notorious Reaper Council takes away her new life for good?
1
“Incoming!” yelled the girl I was supervising as she waved her wand with such enthusiasm that the tray of drinks spilled half its contents on its journey across the restaurant.
“Oops,” she said. “Sorry.”
Another wave of her wand cleared up the mess—which would have been fine if she hadn’t forgotten the tray in the process. As the glasses toppled through the air, I whipped out my own wand and saved them before they hit the floor.
“Thanks!” she said, beaming at me.
I didn’t return her smile. I’d been put in charge of watching the applicants to replace Hayley, the Riverside Inn’s former bartender, who’d been sent for a long stretch in jail for murder. Unfortunately, there was a distinct lack of promising bar staff in town. We’d already dismissed one candidate for sneezing on the cutlery, and I was starting to worry this one would end up being worse than yesterday’s, who’d given the wrong order to the notoriously picky Mrs Terrence and dropped a tray of appetisers on the floor.
“You don’t have to levitate the glasses,” I told her. “It’s fine to carry them by hand.”
“Oh, okay.” She picked the tray out of the air and began to carry it to the nearest table. Halfway there, she tripped over her own feet. The tray fell from her hands, and I hastened to wave my wand again to rescue it before the glasses spilled their remaining contents onto the floor.
“Sorry,” she said, catching her balance. Flustered, she plucked the tray out of the air again, leaving a trail of dripping water everywhere.
“Let me take that back,” I said to her, shooting an apologetic look at the people sitting at the nearby table and waiting patiently for their order. “You remake the drinks, okay?”
As she ducked back behind the bar, I cleaned up the mess with another wave of my wand and levitated the tray back to the bar. As I did so, Allie Forbes, owner of the Riverside Inn, entered from the side door connecting the restaurant to the lobby of the inn. Her long, curly hair was tied back underneath her red-brimmed hat, while equally bright red socks poked out from underneath the hem of her cloak. “How’s it going?”
“It’s… going.” That was the most positive thing I had to say about the current trial. Dropping my voice, I added, “She can’t seem to go two minutes without dropping something.”
“Ah,” she said. “Yes… that’s not what we want. Go on, send her home. The next one arrives in half an hour.”
“Sure.” I walked back behind the bar to join the girl, waiting for her to finish making the drinks before sending her home in case I startled her into spilling something else. “Hey. You can go home now. We’ll let you know if you got the job within the week.”
Or rather, as soon as we found someone capable of walking across the room without causing more havoc than a poltergeist in a museum.
“Okay, sure.” She abandoned the tray, and I finished making the drinks and levitated them over to the right table—this time without spilling them on the floor. “Thanks for giving me a shot,” she added.
“No worries. If you don’t hear back, assume we hired someone else.” I waved her off as she bounded away from the bar towards the door. She might not be good at the job, but that didn’t mean I had to take out my frustration on her. I’d been on the wrong side of too many bosses who’d treated me like crap not to have an iota of compassion in these situations, and I’d also been shunted from one job to another throughout most of my adult life. Sometimes it took a while to figure out the right fit.
As she left the restaurant, I sighed and set about cleaning up the water she’d spilled all over the work surface. I wasn’t the best at bar work, but I was even worse at dealing with people, living or otherwise. I’d hoped to find a contender with a more customer-friendly personality than mine who also happened to be suitable for the job, but that seemed too much to ask of the universe today.
Mart blew a raspberry after her as she left. “Well, that was a disaster. She’s clumsier than a moon-drunk werewolf.”
I ignored my brother until I was sure the girl was out of earshot. Not that she could actually hear him, since he was a ghost—a good thing, because he’d been flying around, singing at the top of his lungs and generally making a nuisance of himself in the background throughout her trial—but she could hear me, and I preferred she didn’t know the dead were mocking her behind her back.
None of the other customers could see my brother, either, not even when he danced among the tables and made the glasses rattle. Seeing ghosts was rare for witches, but I was half Reaper, so I was more than used to the presence of the dead in my life. Especially Mart, who’d died an untimely death at the age of eighteen and had spent the years since then haunting me on a daily basis and generally making me look unhinged to anyone not in the know about my talents.
When the door closed behind the applicant, he added, “Maybe you should specify in the job ad that the bartender needs to be able to walk in a straight line without tripping over their own feet.”
“We haven’t had many applications,” I told him. “We’re giving everyone a fair shot.”
“You must be desperate.” He flew around my back and pirouetted behind the bar. “Can I work here instead?”
“Do you have a steady enough hand to pour drinks?”
Mart was stronger than the majority of his fellow ghosts, and his skills ranged from turning lights on and off to sending text messages to my ex-boyfriends without my permission. He also happened to be one of the reasons I’d had so much trouble hanging onto a job, which was one good reason I preferred not to have him as a coworker. Admittedly, my last job, at the morgue, had ended in disaster after the dead had decided they needed a say in their own funerals, and Mart himself hadn’t even got involved. That kind of thing was hard enough to explai
n to my fellow paranormals, let alone to ordinary people who lived in the world outside of the magical community I’d grown up in. Honestly, compared to that fiasco, the trials had been a smooth ride.
“Sure.” A glass floated across the bar, and the tap turned on, completely missing its target and spilling water all over the floor.
“Mart, turn it off.” The flow of water intensified, so I walked over to turn off the tap and got sprayed with water all down my brand-new apron for my trouble.
Allie walked in behind me. “Everything okay?”
“My brother’s trying to prove he’s better than the people we’ve trialled.” I turned the tap off with a firm twist. “He says he wants to work here, but I think you want a living staff member, right?”
“Hard to pay a ghost,” she commented as Mart pulled faces in the background.
“I usually pay him in hot showers, but if you did that, your water bill would be through the roof.” Yet another reason Mart was weirder than the average spirit. He liked to joke that it was because he’d only had me to talk to for most of the years since his death, to which I responded that it was no wonder I’d had so much trouble fitting into any community, magical or not. In fact, my stint in Hawkwood Hollow was the longest I’d lasted in one place for a while, and I certainly hadn’t expected to end up sticking around when I’d first arrived in town. The town of Hawkwood Hollow was more haunted than anywhere else I’d ever been, and as a Reaper, I was a natural magnet for spirits. The whole reason I’d come here was to help Carey get rid of a troublesome ghost, and I’d fully intended to leave the instant we’d achieved that goal.
Instead, I’d ended up working full time at the inn while helping Carey with her ghost hunting on the weekends. I was also dating Detective Drew Gardener, who happened to be the chief of police in town. If anything, that part was more surprising than the rest of it put together.
Allie grinned. “You certainly keep things interesting, Maura. Tell your brother he can be on our reserve team if he likes.”
“She doesn’t have to tell me,” Mart said. “I’m standing right here.”
“Be nice.” I used a towel to wipe the water droplets off my new laminated name badge, which said, Maura Clarke, Staff. I wore it with pride. “Like Allie said, you’re on the reserve team, assuming you don’t start pouring drinks on people’s heads when you get bored.”
If you asked me, it was harder to fire a ghost than to pay one, though I was one of few people with the ability to send ghosts into a permanent afterlife. Not that my brother had the slightest fear that I’d do that to him, because it was me who’d used my Reaper skills to enable him to stick around after death to begin with.
“I’ll be on my best behaviour,” he said. “Promise. Do I get a shiny name badge, too?”
I gave him an eye-roll. Ghosts usually appeared wearing the same clothes they’d died in for reasons that frankly even I didn’t know, so he was still outfitted in the muddy jeans and scuffed shoes he’d worn as a teenager. “Sure, but only if you let me put your full name on it, Mortimer Clarke.”
He shot a rude gesture in my direction, while I returned to watching the door. The next potential bartender would arrive around the time Carey got back from school, which would mean that I’d have company other than my brother to deal with whoever was next on the list. Or help me clean up spilled drinks, if necessary. At least I had a date with Drew to look forward to tonight.
After a few minutes, Carey entered the restaurant with her head bowed and her shoulders hunched. As usual, she wore her mustard-yellow school uniform, along with bright-red socks that matched her mother’s. She walked over to the table nearest to the bar, where she usually sat to do her homework while I was working on my evening shift, and slumped into a seat. Her familiar, Casper, joined her, meowing a greeting to me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked Carey.
She glanced up at me. “Someone else in my class has started a ghost-hunting blog.”
“Seriously?” I said. “Who?”
“You won’t know her,” she said. “But Cris already has a bigger following than me, and she only started her blog a day ago.”
My heart sank a little. Carey had been fascinated by ghosts and hauntings before she’d even met me, and her blog had been the reason we’d met in the first place. The knowledge that one of her fellow students—who, by all accounts, weren’t particularly nice to her—had stolen her idea didn’t sit right with me.
“Has she actually posted anything yet, though?” I asked. “Any real ghost footage, I mean?”
“Well… no,” she said. “But she’s popular at school, and everyone’s waiting to see what she finds.”
“Doesn’t mean she’ll do a good job at running a blog,” I said. “Can she actually see ghosts?”
Carey shook her head. Most witches couldn’t see ghosts, and fewer than average had that ability here in Hawkwood Hollow. Carey herself didn’t have the gift, though her homemade ghost goggles helped her detect spirits, and I’d spent the last few weeks helping her find places where we could get good footage for her to post online. While there were ghosts in every corner of town, that didn’t mean they were all inclined to cooperate with us. Most were barely strong enough to lift a feather, while others could levitate the furniture and rattle the windows. Carey was still perfecting her ghost-sensing cameras, so she could only pick up on the more extreme spirits, and I preferred to supervise where I could. I hadn’t counted on someone else swiping her idea, though if this Cris person thought ghost hunting would be easy, she was in for a rude awakening.
“How were the new bartenders, anyway?” she asked. “Find anyone good?”
“Not great,” I admitted. “The last two were duds. We have one more coming in any minute now, and if they don’t turn out to be any good, we’ll have to wait for another batch of applicants.”
“Oh,” she said. “I hoped we’d find someone by now.”
“So did I, but I’d rather hire Mart than the last person we tried,” I responded. “And that’s saying a lot.”
“Hey!” Mart said indignantly.
Carey’s gaze followed mine when I glanced in his direction. She might not be able to see ghosts herself, but she knew I could, so she’d been learning to track their movements through my eyes. Casper was even more attuned to spirits, evidenced by the way his cat eyes followed my brother’s movements.
“Anyway, forget this girl’s blog,” I said. “If it’s just her friends who are reading it, then it’s not the content they care about. Your subscribers are strangers from all over the country who genuinely want to read your posts. That’s much more impressive, trust me.”
A smile tugged at her mouth. “Thanks, Maura.”
“It’s true,” I added. “Seriously, I bet this girl’s just going through a phase. Once she realises ghosts won’t show up and entertain her, she’ll get bored and shut it down. You’ve been doing this stuff for years, and you have way more of a knowledge base. Also, you have me.”
Her smile faded. “Sometimes I wish I could see ghosts. Cris… she said it didn’t count if I couldn’t. She called me a fake.”
“Well, she’s talking complete crap, especially if she can’t see them,” I said. “Pay no attention to her. If you like, I can send Mart to freak her out and make her regret asking ghosts to follow her around.”
“I’d be more than happy to,” added Mart, putting on a menacing grin. “Should I go and haunt her for a while?”
Carey’s mouth turned down at the corners. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. What if she uses the footage on her blog?”
“Let’s save it until later,” I told Mart. “When Carey says so, you can go haunt her, but don’t start causing trouble, okay?”
“It was your idea,” Mart pointed out.
Allie returned to the restaurant and approached us. “Hey, Carey. How was school?”
Carey gave a noncommittal shrug. “Maura said the bartender trials haven’t been great.”
&nbs
p; “And the next one’s late,” Allie remarked. “I think our third trial is a no-show.”
“Should have figured.” I wouldn’t complain about not having to deal with another incompetent aspiring bartender, but I was already working fifty-odd hours a week thanks to the lack of other permanent staff, and it would have been nice to have someone else to take some of the pressure off so I had more time to myself. “I can wait for him.”
“Doesn’t bode well for his employability if he’s already late.” Allie shook her head. “I think people are avoiding applying, because… you know.”
Because the last bartender turned out to be a murderer. Yeah. That.
“Not necessarily,” I said. “I annoyed the entire coven when I drove Mina out of town, so pretty much all the local witches with a link to the coven are avoiding the place. I bet they’ve been telling tales about me to everyone else, too.”
Not only had I exposed Hayley as a murderer, I’d also driven the leader of the local witch coven to leave town, therefore unintentionally making enemies of everyone in the coven who’d supported Mina Devlin. Regardless, I had zero regrets about solving the years-old murder case, which had seen Hayley lose her job and exposed Mina Devlin as complicit in multiple crimes herself. I wasn’t shedding any tears over the departure of the controlling ex-coven leader, that was for sure. All the same, I did feel like I needed to step up and help Allie find a replacement bartender, and not just so I’d have more free time to see Drew. Not that I’d be complaining if I did.